Sophie sat up and frowned at her sister.

“Are you seriously worried about that?” she asked.

“No,” said Emma. “I’m looking forward to it so much, I can hardly stand it. Of course I’m seriously worried! This is the night before my wedding, we’ll be sitting around the house with my mother, who doesn’t like my future mother-in-law, my mother-in-law, who really, really hates my father-in-law, and my father-in-law, who everyone else loves, which is going to infuriate my mother-in-law, and there’s going to be bad feeling. And I really and truly can’t tell you how much I don’t want bad feeling on the night before my wedding.”

“Well, we can’t have it, then, can we?” said Sophie. “What are we going to do about it, Lulu-belle?”

Lulu stretched herself luxuriously under the towel. “Simple scientific solution,” she said with a yawn. “We sit Caroline at one end of the kitchen table next to Dad at the top, and Andrew at the other end of the same side next to Mom at the bottom. Caroline and Andrew can’t see each other without craning, Caroline and Mom are too far away from each other to revisit the War of Independence, and the same goes for Dad and Andrew and the Incredible Melting Strawberry Buttercup Band, or whatever they’re called. Sophie and I sit in between, one of us makes extra-special best friends with Caroline, the other with Andrew, and we both keep them talking so hard to us that they each barely notice the other.”

“Brilliant!” said Sophie. “Problem solved. My sister’s a genius, first prize for Lulu.”

“Actually,” said Emma slowly, “that’s not half a bad idea, Lulu. If you could keep them both happy and distracted, so that Caroline feels spoilt and stays in a relatively good mood, and Andrew’s kept too busy to join in the general conversation and remind her that he’s there, then maybe it might just be okay after all. It’d be quite hard work for you, though, especially the one who has Caroline. Would you two really do this for me?”

“We’d do more than that for you,” said Sophie. “We’d walk through fire for you. We’d dance on knives for you. We’d snog poison snakes for you. Bagsy Andrew.”

Lulu shook her head and sighed. “You can’t have Andrew,” she explained. “He always flirts with you, and that’d send Caroline into meltdown. You’d probably better avoid him for the whole weekend, in fact. I’ll have to have Andrew, I’ll wear my paisley shirt and bombard him with scientific questions. You can take Caroline.”

“That’s not fair!” said Sophie. “A whole evening of Caroline? She’s horrible. Sorry, Emma, Matthew’s lovely, you know we all think that, but she’s really awful.”

Lulu sat up and regarded Sophie benignly through the steam.

“That’s what you get for being the charming one,” she told her. “The tough cases.”

Sophie sighed.

“Wow,” said Emma quietly, after a moment. “If you two would do that for me, I’d be more grateful than I could say.”